Daniel Rowland:
That's the most important thing about community to me. It's not about finding a guitar player or something. It's about letting people who you respect hear what you're doing and comment on it before it goes out to the wider world. And I think as you do that, then I think this is probably with your community as well. Modern musician, the odds of you putting something out that people are going to embrace on the fan side of things is much higher.

Michael Walker:
It's easy to get lost in today's music industry with constantly changing technology where anyone with a computer can release their own music. I'm going to share with you why this is the best time to be an independent musician and it's only getting better. If you have high quality music but you just don't know the best way to promote yourself so that you can reach the right people and generate a sustainable income with your music, we're going to show you the best strategies that we're using right now to reach millions of new listeners every month without spending 10 hours a day on social media. We're creating a revolution for today's music industry and this is your invitation to join me. I'm your host, Michael Walker.
All right. Excited to be here today with Daniel Rowland. Daniel is an LA-based audio engineer and producer, educator, visual artist and tech executive. He's currently the head of Strategy and Partnerships at LANDRAudio, which is an online distribution mastering collaboration platform which has grown to nearly five million artists, which is amazing. I mean, if you're a musician, then it's likely you've probably heard of LANDR at some point. If you haven't, you should totally go check it out because it's such a cool tool to help you to improve the quality of your songs. Something I'm personally really excited to geek out and connect with Daniel and hear some of his thoughts about technology when it comes to production and creating music and maybe the future with AI and whatnot. So super cool.
Daniel has been a part of numerous international tours. He's produced music for an Oscar winning Pixar film. He's mastered and helped mix many, many different albums including multi-platinum Grammy nominated albums. Work with projects like Nine Inch Nails, Seal, Flo Rida, Gwen Stefani, The Sandbox, along with dozens of Disney properties such as Star Wars and Marvel. We actually just talking a little bit backstage about how we live in Florida, about five inch away from Disney World because my wife is a huge Disney fan. He's like, "I know Disney. I've done a few things with them." So Daniel, thank you so much for taking the time to be here today.

Daniel Rowland:
Man, thank you for having me.

Michael Walker:
To start out with, I'd love to just hear a little bit more about your story and how you got started and found your way here towards being the head of strategy and partnerships at LANDR.

Daniel Rowland:
Mine is everyone has their own kind of circuitous path to getting where they are and mine's certainly no different. The majority of my life was as a musician, so I wasn't really in music technology. I was a guitar player, singer, to a lesser degree, a composer. This is in Charleston, South Carolina, and I figured, "Okay, I'd gotten done as much as I could in that space." And I was like, "Okay, I need to figure something else out." I was playing five shows a week, drinking way too much and I was like, "Okay, what do you do now?" I ended up going to college for music technology fairly late in life, in my late 20s and I went and got a bachelor's and a master's degree in recording and music tech.
And that's what pivoted me from being a musician into the technology and music production side of the business. From there, just started working on a lot of professional projects. I mean, my career basically has three pillars, one of which is the creative side, mixing and mastering, that kind of stuff. Some composition, some production. Super passionate about education. I've been a college professor for about 15 years teaching music production, midi synthesis, composition, recording and pro tools, all that. Then probably the biggest chunk of my time these days is tech development. Like you mentioned, LANDR, I co-founded another company named Audio Tool, which is an online DAW where you can make music in the cloud. Several other companies.
And I consult for Google and other companies on Web3 and things like that. Not to be long winded, but I used to work with artists all the time and that was my focus. Now I work with companies and startups and I treat them like I used to treat artists, if that makes any sense. Or I get to contribute little bits and guide them on their path. It's been an interesting trajectory to get to the point where I'm at and who knows. The way technology's going and I'm sure we're going to talk about some of this, I have no idea where I'm going to be in the next two years because I don't know where tech's going to be. It's growing so fast, it's crazy.

Michael Walker:
That's so cool. That's interesting what we bring up about how you've been connecting both from the... You have the roots from music but then also you're connecting with this technology world. There's definitely been one thing I've noticed with building relationships with entrepreneurs and people in the education space, as well as people in the software world. And it makes you so excited to hear that you're talking about a cloud-based DAW platform. As soon as I learned about GitHub and was like, "Wait, what?" All these developers can collaborate on the same project and they can branch out and then push things back to the main mother branch and then everyone could have the mother branch.
Why does this not exist for music and being able to create music together where you have the base production and then thousands of people can contribute different parts and then someone decides, "You know what? I want to add this branch." Or, "I don't want to add this branch and then update all of it." It sounds like that might be exactly what you're referring to with the software that you're working on.

Daniel Rowland:
Well, it's interesting. I guess there's two ways you can look at it. If you're somebody like me who's used to using a traditional desktop based DAW, like Pro Tools or Garage Band or Logic or picked up tons of them, there's products... LANDR has a collaboration product that will connect DAWs and let you upload your files to the cloud and iterate on them and everyone can download them and you can really track either with live video or asynchronously, not in real time, the trajectory of a project as you move through ideation through release. So that's really cool if you're used to working with more professional tools.
Then the other company Audio Tool I'm involved in earlier in the user flow than that. In other words, it's a DAW that lives in the cloud. So it's like you go into their ecosystem, use their tools and we can all work collaboratively together at the same time building up music or recording tracks or whatever. One of which is an assistant for the professional tools, it's an add-on. LANDR is for the professional DAWs that exists and the other one catches everybody who hasn't even gotten that far, as far as their understanding of DAWs or whatever and they just want to work in the cloud. My whole thing is to try to cast the widest net to be as inclusive as many people who want to be creators and a percentage of them will continue to level up and use more professional tools and then I work with different companies that address all of those demographics, basically.

Michael Walker:
Cool. Man, there's a lot of stuff that I feel like I could unpack or ask you about. There's five different paths that I want to go ahead right now just to hear your thoughts. But definitely would love to dig into LANDR as a tool. For everyone who's listening, which is predominantly musicians, how they can leverage the technology that's available today to streamline their creative flow, which is amazing. Then also along that path, I'm excited to zoom out a little bit further. Like you mentioned, things are changing so quickly but some of these movements around what you just mentioned opening up the playing field now so more people who wouldn't traditionally be considered a creator.
Especially from a musical standpoint, can use tools like artificial intelligence to be able to make it so that... Splice, for example, probably people who are very successful now who don't know how to play an instrument but they can go on Splice and have amazing sounding samples and have... In some cases, a lot of benefits that you don't necessarily have even if you're a really amazing keyboard player but you don't necessarily know how MIDI works or how to integrate with things.

Daniel Rowland:
100%. Just a comment on that, man. I mean, you're a producer in that case. There's a lot of producers I know who either aren't musicians at all or aren't great musicians, I probably consider myself one, it's more about curation in relationships and picking the right people to do the right things and assembling the right team. And if that's very similar to something like Splice or LANDR samples or Loot Masters or anything else is where you're going in and... I say this all the time, that we've gotten to a point where curation is creation. Your taste is a creative outlet even if you're not the one actually doing the creation.
We've looked at DJs for a long time as that. What they're doing is oftentimes curating other people's music and understanding how to present it and when to present it to an audience. With all these AI tools and samples and loops and the widespread availability of that, your ability to pick things that you like even if you didn't create them is just as valid as somebody like me who may play it on guitar drums or something, I think.

Michael Walker:
Wow. I love that. Curation is becoming creation itself. It seems like we're tapping into what is creation at its root or what is the creative impulse. For all of us as musicians and just as human beings, we've experienced creative flow or creative energy. A lot of times, people will speak to how it's almost like they're channeling, like it's coming through them and it's almost like an out-of-body experience. And it seems like a lot of the most talented performers even will... They don't have to think about where their fingers are going to play the piano, it just happens and it channels through them.
So it sounds like what you're saying is that as time is moving forward, these tools are getting better and better and better at being able to interpret what's the actual meaning, the intention behind the creative thought and being able to take that creative thought. Even if you don't have the neural pathways built to your fingers to be able to play it, to able interpret that creative impulse and be able to turn it into an actual tangible thing to communicate.

Daniel Rowland:
Boy, you actually said that really well. And when I say what I just said about the curation is creation, all that kind of stuff, that's not to discount virtuosity or the craft of learning how to play an instrument or compose a song. That is still the height of creativity, at least to me, personally. But a lot of these tools are designed to meet people where they are, understanding that not everybody has access to a piano or a guitar or whatever. And just get people in the door to realize everyone's adopted being a photographer and being a videographer through social media and all this stuff. Where is the funnel for music creators that might have not thought of music as an outlet beyond just being a fan.
A lot of those tools really are the onboarding ramp for that. And those people may go on to be virtuoso cello players and piano players and songwriters and all that kind of stuff. But what you said I thought was very interesting is the idea that these tools are really lowering the barrier. So even if you don't have the language to convey what you want or you don't have the skills, the neural pathways to perform it yourself, they meet you where you are and however you can describe it, you can make things appear. I mean, just to go on a quick little tangent, I think most people are probably familiar with, and if you're not you should check it out, things like Dall-E and Midjourney, the text to image and now becoming text to video creation where you can literally just type in something you want to exist and you will see an artistic rendering of that or a video of that.
And how that's now coming online in the music world where you can describe what you want. It won't just go out there and find some loops or samples that you could maybe assemble who will actually generate that music for you. And that's where where we are now and where we're going to continue to go in the next three, four, five years or that stuff will be productized and accessible to everybody. So it's really going to be a brave new world on the creator side of things.

Michael Walker:
Wow. This conversation is so exciting to me. I love this stuff. Have you heard of Neuralink?

Daniel Rowland:
Yeah, I have.

Michael Walker:
I mean, that's a pretty crazy technology. Especially when we're talking about this stuff right here, it's interpreting this neural, the intentions or the thoughts essentially to be able to create something. It seems like what you're talking about right now could provide a bridge so that if there was some implant like Neuralink, this brain interface that we could translate those electrical signals into pure music literally just by sitting and using your thoughts to create it.

Daniel Rowland:
Well, it's funny, there's a device that I picked up maybe two years ago and I'm trying to remember the name of the company. It's driving me crazy. Anyway, it's a band you put around your head and there's a bunch of electrodes that basically touch the back of your head and it wirelessly connects to your computer and you can sit and look at the computer and play very basic video games and things with your thoughts. So if you envision certain things, you can make them happen. And I was working on a thing in Unity where you can actually play piano by thinking about what you want to happen, if that makes sense. It's very rudimentary compared to what Neuralink, I think, it's going to be able to do, but it's effectively a similar thing where it's hands-free with gaming, with music, with all sorts of other stuff. So that's totally going to be more of a thing here in the next couple years.

Michael Walker:
Wow. So awesome.

Daniel Rowland:
Nerdy stuff. Hopefully, everyone's not tuning out. It's crazy time.

Michael Walker:
I mean, it's time if they're still listening to this podcast, they're probably used to be geeking out and being weird. I think we're all good. So cool. It's interesting because you talked about this point, which is a sensitive subject, I think. Because so many of us have invested so much time and energy into honing our crafts and honing our instrumentation. And there certainly is a level of mastery and putting in that time that even as AI makes it easier and easier for people to create music, even if they don't necessarily have that background, it does seem like similar to...
There's certain tools right now that are really pretty dang cool that will help you write copy. Email, blogs or articles and things where you can type in a few prompts, and that AI generates a full article for you. So it's like, "I want to write an article about musicians and neural interfaces. Write an article." And it's going to generate a decent chunk of an article for that topic. It's not going to be perfect. There's going to be some curation, there's going to be... But it's a nice starting point. It does seem like what you're speaking to with the people who are going to be the most ready I think to leverage this type of service are the ones who already have mastery and have developed that curation skill, the creative skill itself. This just saves so much time and energy.
Imagine if you could click on a button on your computer and say, "You know what? I just went through this breakup in my life and here's what I'm feeling, here are my thoughts and my emotions about it. Here are five of my other songs that I've already released. Here's my most successful one based on all this data. I love this song, this song, this song. These are the songs that this reminds me of." You press a button and it pops out a full song, at least five different versions of the songs. Like, "Which of these sounds best?" And then you take it and roll with it. Is that how you imagine a process looking like in the relative in near future?

Daniel Rowland:
Sure. That exists now, what you basically just described. As crazy as that is. I'll go into some companies here in a minute, but I think it's really important because... My perspective on this, I'm a musician, I spent a lot of my time, went to school for it. I'm a professional audio engineer, I spent a lot of my life perfecting those skills. So my immediate reaction, and I've been in this space for about almost a decade now on the AI powered tool side of things. My first reaction was what I think most people's reaction was, is like, "Screw that, that's here to take my job away," and blah, blah, blah. All this stuff. And I think that's a totally valid reaction. It's valid if people actually just feel that way even after we discussed it.
But what I realized is for a lot of this stuff, that's actually not what it's doing. If you just take LANDR, not being a chill for LANDR, but they're a good example because they were one of the first companies ever in this space and they automated mastering. Of course, I'm a mastering engineer. A lot of my colleagues were like, "Okay, we're going to be out of jobs in five years." And now it's 10 years later and I think more music's being mastered by humans now than has ever been. Because what it did, and we didn't know it necessarily at the time, but it really helped educate a huge segment of the music making public that would never hire a human mastering engineer on the importance of mastering.
They can make their songs and run it through LANDR and see what it sounds like and try to do it themselves and really level their skill set up. As I said earlier, a percentage of them then go on to hire human mastering engineers or do it themselves or whatever. And that was all good. I think, as AI's crept into the composition phase of music, it gets a little scarier when you can push a button and just generate music so a human doesn't need to even be involved in the inception of the idea. But what you said is true, a lot of those tools can be great helpers for musicians as far as increasing your efficiency or being a collaborator to give you feedback and ideas that maybe you wouldn't have thought of as far as helping you compose in genres that maybe you're not super familiar with.
Not to be long-winded, but as far as being standalone, one button push tools that will generate a fully fleshed piece of music that's comparable to what a human would do, a talented human, they're not really there yet. So it's not something that is going to put anybody out of a job necessarily at the moment. There are challenges in the future I see, especially in sync licensing and advertising work and stuff that we'll see come up. But a lot of it's just not as good as what people think it is or what it's advertised to be at present, if that makes any sense.

Michael Walker:
That totally makes sense. It sounds like what you're saying is that for the time being at least, these tools, they don't necessarily take away from your ability to create but they just make the process easier and they take away things that can be done for you earlier on so that you could focus more on the parts that you uniquely can contribute. Maybe some that's more around curation.

Daniel Rowland:
Yeah. For the most part, especially on the engineering and the mastering and the mixing and in restoration side of things, yes. I'm a perfect example of this. I don't have time to compose much music anymore, but when I do, I use some AI tools to help me with that. And they work exactly the way that you described, where I can make a couple selections and it'll render an orchestral score for me or I can upload music that I've composed or that I like as influences and it will use that as a guide and it will give me back a MIDI score.
And then I can manipulate that score and we can continually iterating back and forth and come up with stuff that maybe takes me out of my comfort zone or my box or helps me with time management, et cetera, et cetera. I use a tool called AIVA, A-I-V-A, which is pretty what probably the most deep tool developed so far feature set-wise when it comes to AI composition. But there's a whole bunch of them out there. Every day, I see a new one pop up. Anyway, there's a lot going on.

Michael Walker:
Well, I'm definitely going to check that out. That sounds really cool.

Daniel Rowland:
It's crazy.

Michael Walker:
Awesome. I'd love to dig a little bit into LANDR as a service and the journey with how it was created and what are some of the biggest... I would say to start with, what are some of the biggest challenges that you see musicians struggling with when they first come to LANDR and what kind of challenge do you guys overcome?

Daniel Rowland:
It's actually an interesting question because I've mentioned already, LANDR started as AI mastering and then it was like, "Okay, that'll be the business. We'll be an AI mastering company. We'll help people make their music sound better." Great, that's pretty decent sized market. But what we found when we started that is our users kept giving us feedback on their pain points. Which, I guess, any company gets, on what they wish existed in the world and what their struggles in making music. And what we found was that a big part of their struggles was how fractionalized the music creation tool space is.
Pretend you're just starting to make music, I know a lot of people listening to this have been doing it for years, and you have to pick a DAW to use, a digital audio workstation. You got to pick the microphone and you got to pick the audio interface, you got to pick the plugins, you got to pick how do you distribute your music, how do you collaborate with other people. All those things exist, and when companies do those things extremely well at varying price points but there's no platform that's really integrated them all together for a turnkey solution you can just go to and have everything you need and then go tax stuff on as you learn more and grow and that type of stuff.
So LANDR, over the years, has grown to be that. Where we literally are the only company that I know of in the history of the music industry that encompasses everything you could possibly need from the moment you come up with an idea, including a DAW, including all the plugins and instruments you need, to ways to collaborate, like I was talking about earlier, live with other people or do project management in the cloud, to all the samples you could need, to unlimited distribution, unlimited mastering, access to talent if you need to hire somebody to shoot a video for you or give you feedback on a song or promote your music, everything under one umbrella for under 15 bucks a month or whatever. Something that's affordable, long story short. That's what we are as a company.
It's very challenging because it's so broad in not just developing and all that stuff, but messaging that properly to people because they're just used to being messaged like, "Okay, you need this DAW or this mic but this is saying no, this is everything." It's been cool and we've been very lucky, especially in the past year to bring on many of the major companies in the music industry as partners who've looked at what we're doing and saying, "We should help them do that because it's just going to help more people make music." Whether it's the Focusrites of the world or Avid or Ableton or Arturia or any of these companies, Spitfire, it's been cool. So they've helped contribute things that we can offer our users, either knowledge-wise, education-wise or product-wise to level out and even out the platform. Anyway, that's basically what LANDR is.

Michael Walker:
Wow. So cool. It sounds like basically, you have created and you're creating what we've been talking about for this entire conversation about how do you... Which is how do you take someone who has an idea and as easily and streamlined as possible be able to translate that idea into an actual production, into a high quality sounding production. Is that a fair way of putting it?

Daniel Rowland:
That's a fair way to put it. And LANDR's approach is a little different than some of the AI platforms we were talking about that kind of compose the music for you. We don't do any of that. We're more about if we can provide all the tools somebody could need and then we provide the education touchpoints to help shepherd them along the journey, then that's good enough for a lot of music creators. We tend to focus on that side of things. We have AI mastering but that's the main AI component to the platform. That's everybody. That's me, that's my students, that's people more professional than me, there's stuff there for them to use. So that's the approach.

Michael Walker:
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So if you're curious and you want to take advantage of the free trial, then go click on the link in the show notes right now, you can sign up for free. From there, you can check out all of the amazing content, connect with the community and sign up for the live masterclasses that happen every week. This is a gift for listening to our podcast, supporting the show. So don't miss it out. Go sign up for free now and let's get back to our interview. Based on the very little that we've connected based on this conversation, it wouldn't surprise me having you nogging in there if the future, in five, 10 years, AI's a heavily part of the ecosystem. So it sounds like-

Daniel Rowland:
Maybe, yeah.

Michael Walker:
Maybe not. Maybe we'll keep something for the humans.

Daniel Rowland:
LANDR's definitely on the side of leaving that more to the humans. But the last thing I'll say before we move on is that the reason I got involved in the AI space, I kind of stumbled into it. I was not some super tech savvy person. I don't want anybody to listen to this and think I was some genius programmer and musician. No, I'm a musician and a creative person who knows what I like to hear and what I would like to see out in the world. And I enjoy educating people. That's a huge passion of mine.
So I got involved because I want people who are in the music industry to be shepherding this technology instead of just leaving it up to businesses who are going to make very dry, uncreative decisions with what to do with it, if that makes sense. I would much rather, instead of being a passive bystander, shaking my fist at tech that scares me be somebody that's involved in making it be something that works for all of us. So that's what LANDR does and that's any company I work with, that's got to be their MO or I'm not going to be involved.

Michael Walker:
Awesome. That's super cool. I can definitely relate. A lot of the things that you're talking about, I feel like I personally can really relate to. With Modern Musician, all of our team members, we have 35 team members, and they're all musicians themselves. Really, our core focus is similar to what you just described but on the side of now that they've worked with a service like LANDR, they've honed their craft and they have this music, what are some different ways they can get heard by the right people who are going to resonate with it and how can they turn it into a career? It seems like there's a ton of alignment with what you guys have built.
What we don't really focus on at all with Modern Musician, which is mostly just because there's people who are smarter than I am who have way more experience like what you guys are doing with LANDR, that we can point people towards. I mean, that's the root. It's the heart of artists and creators, it's their creation and that creative process and being able to help them to be able to shape their voice and be able to express that in as powerful and as impactful a way as possible is really cool work. So I'd super appreciate what you guys are working on. I think it's really cool and looking forward to hopefully staying connected over a long period of time, and figuring out how we can personally contribute to your vision and helping artists and our community use the tools that are available to them nowadays to also just make the creative process more streamlined.

Daniel Rowland:
Definitely. I'll throw that right back at you because equally as important these days is helping people make more music and make it sound better is what the hell do you do with the music after you make it. You know what I mean? I know that's at least part of the focus of yours is how do people monetize and get a social following and actually get some traction if that's what they want to do with the music that they make. So that's equally as valuable and as important.

Michael Walker:
Just connecting the music with the right fans who are most likely to resonate with it, right?

Daniel Rowland:
100%.

Michael Walker:
Cool. Could you walk me through a little bit... Let's say that I'm an artist right now listening to this, and I've heard about LANDR before and maybe I've even played around with a demo at one point. I'm like, "Wow, this is pretty cool." And they're just wondering, "Where do I get started with LANDR if I want to tip my toes into the pool or look at the tip of the iceberg?" What does it look like for them to be able to get started with LANDR's service?

Daniel Rowland:
Definitely. You can go to the platform. And obviously for your listener, I'll give you codes and stuff you can give out so people can try it out 110%. Some stuff that you pay for, it's a subscription basically. So the way that LANDR works is we've got a whole bunch of stuff. I won't even go back into it that we have. But you can go engage with individually, but the real way to do it is under our umbrella subscription that I said is, whatever, 14, 15 bucks a month and that's where you just get everything under the sun if that's what you want. And again, covering distribution and things like that as well.
That's really the way to do it is to go try that out. There's a lot of free tools on LANDR as well that I would really encourage. I don't think a lot of people know about that you should take advantage of all that collaboration stuff I talked about is free on LANDR. So if you want to go work with a team of people, whether you're a small record label or an independent musician and you want to collaborate and have real-time video chat with timestamped video and audio comments on songs and iteration of mixes and all that, it's all free.
It's worth going and playing around with the platform. Even if you decide, "The mastering is not for me." Or, "I've got a distributor." It doesn't matter. There's plenty of stuff there to take a look at before you even get into the samples and plugins and all that stuff. I mean, that's a vague answer, but I would just go jump on the site LANDR.com. Not to be a shield for LANDR here, but I think it is an interesting approach in the industry as far as casting a wide net and it is worth a look because there's probably something there that you're going to dig.

Michael Walker:
100%. If I remember correctly, I mean, LANDR, the way you described it, it started out as a mastering service. I mean, an incredible mastering service as well. A lot of you that are listening this right now probably have used LANDR at some point or know of it because it's such a cool tool to be able to make your music, your demos. Your songs sound significantly better just with a few seconds of uploading it to LANDR. So that sounds super cool.
I would love to talk with you more about some of those new, some of the features, some of the direction that you're moving towards in terms of, if I'm understanding it correctly, it sounds like you're building more of a holistic community center to LANDR so that it really is a place where you go to network and connect with other creators and be able to workshop these ideas together. Maybe we could talk a little bit more about that community side and what kind of... You mentioned that was out of direct feedback from people saying, "It's fractured, we want to connect it." But maybe you could tell me a little bit more about those community features.

Daniel Rowland:
Definitely. I mean, there's two types of fractionalization. The one we talked about already was a fractionalization of the tools and services that you need to make and monetize your music. And the other side is just, "Where do I go to meet either people I want to collaborate with that's in a music ecosystem or to get hired maybe if I have a skill that somebody else doesn't have and they want to pay me for or hire somebody to do something that I'm not good at that's not going to cost me an arm and a leg?" Because not everyone lives in LA or New York or Atlanta or in a major city where they have access to whatever they would need.
So that was a big focus of ours probably three or four years ago where we built out what we call our network, which is where you go. We got thousands and thousands of people on there. I hate to say, it's like a LinkedIn for musicians. But you go there and you have a profile, at least you can put all your demos up there, you can put all your skills, the gear that you have if you want. It's really a bio about who you are. And people connect with each other and you can be hired directly on there, which is cool. So I get hired a lot to be a mastering engineer, a mix person from that. Other people get hired to be guitar players or top liners or just about anything.
And it's less about the getting hired part though that's really cool and it's more just a place to go connect with the people either close to you or across the world that are doing stuff that you vibe with. We had to learn that lesson, actually. It's one thing to go build tools that people use but those won't ever really get traction if people can't go share and have a sense of community with the people using those tools, if that makes sense. It would be like if Instagram, I guess it used to be this, if Instagram was just a bunch of filters for pictures without the social side of it, it would've never grown to be what it is. You need to serve the creative technical tools and you also need to build the community around those tools. And that's what we've done, again, holistically, to try to link all of that together.

Michael Walker:
Cool insight. Having the tools is really important because if you're trying to cut down a tree and you're using your bare fingers versus having a chainsaw, having the tool is incredibly important. But just as important as having the community that's going to support you around using those tools. I've heard a lot of smart quotes around you become the five people that you spend the most of your time with. But as humans, we're such social creatures and our environment means so much. Especially in the music industry, the networking is so important. If we're going at the tree analogy, your community, it's where you're going to plant your tree. And you want to be intentional with the community that you're putting around it. Put fertile soil as opposed to putting weeds around it that are going to harm the progress of being able to blossom. That's what you guys are creating such as this fertile soil for all these beautiful tree creators to come.

Daniel Rowland:
It's funny, I always considered myself to be... I'm a creator, I create alone. I like being in the studio by myself and coming up with stuff. Maybe working with other people, but I tend to be a loner in that regard. And I know there are people who are that way. But the reality is, I mean, I think I just had anxiety around sharing what I was working on with other people. So trying to build a community where you can get feedback on what you're working on as you iterate and feeling like you can put stuff out there that's not completely done so you can learn to get better and get people's opinions on it. That's the most important thing about community to me.
It's not about finding a guitar player or something, it's about letting people who you respect hear what you're doing and comment on it before it goes out to the wider world. And I think as you do that, then I think this is probably with your community as well. Modern Musician, the odds of you putting something out that people are going to embrace on the fan side of things is much higher.

Michael Walker:
That totally makes sense. Along that analogy, you want to be surrounded... Those trees when they're first starting out and they're new blossoms, they're fragile and you need to keep on nurturing them. If you're not careful with where you put that tree, then someone might come stomp on it. But if-

Daniel Rowland:
I like this analogy. You're diving in on this and it's working. It's true, man. Your creativity's fragile. I don't care how badass you are, you still have something in you that is going to react negatively if somebody shits all over something you're working on that's a work in progress. So you do want to surround yourself with people who give constructive feedback and are supportive of what you're trying to do and don't squish your plant. Don't squish it.

Michael Walker:
Don't step on the plant. It reminds me of that Goo Goo Dolls song, Iris, "I don't want the whole world to see me. I'm not sure if they'll understand." Seems like that's just part of one of our deepest core human nature, is to be seen fully and expressed for who we are and this fear of being seen fully and being accepted. Well, anyways, zoom back from the analogy. We can go places with this analogy for a while, but maybe we can geek out a little bit more about the future of technology and where you think that things might be headed towards. I mean, already, you've illuminated me on a few of the software service that are available right now today that you're using that are super cool, that you help to streamline this process of production. Where do you personally think that we're moving towards in terms of being able to take that creative process and make it even more seamless?

Daniel Rowland:
Geez. There's a lot of ways to go with this. A couple of trends, just broadly, one of which is you're probably familiar with, but it's really with blurring the lines between fan and creator. We've already talked about some AI tools that really are starting to do that. Where you can really start to create even if you don't have necessarily a lot of knowledge. Creating doesn't mean doing a symphony or something like that. It means participate. And at the same time, we see the whole Web3 thing on the horizon, even though it's in a bit of a down cycle right now, where you're really empowering fans and creators to gain sovereignty over their content and really be able to engage with fandom in a new way.
Those things, I do think there's going to be a convergence of those two things where you're really going to start to see more, not just fan ownership in the music they like, but participation in the creative process. Artists and fans can win together, that sort of thing. And that's a utopian concept, but I do think we're going to start to see some success around that where you have these AI tools empowering fans and you have on the monetization side of things Web3 and enabling a different relationship between artists and fan.
The other side of things is just I'm seeing a lot going on with the gamification of creation. Now this is interesting. So if you look at Roblox as an example, everyone listening to this, unless you have kids... I just had a daughter, she's not old enough to play Roblox yet, you probably haven't spent a lot of time in Roblox but a lot of kids do. A large chunk of the world under the age of, let's say 13, do that. And you're starting to see music making built into that platform with companies like Splash, as example, which lets kids get on stage and DJ or choose loops and build songs up and things like that, and join virtual bands even if they don't have a lot of knowledge.
I think we're really going to start to see a lot of opportunity because there's an inbuilt community there. You got millions of kids and you have kids creating within those ecosystems. You're going to see a lot of ways to, as you already do, to monetize that music, the merchandise or the virtual merchandise that goes with that as the Metaverse stuff comes around as well. I guess I'm rambling here, but there's a lot of opportunities on the horizon for people listening to this podcast, creators in general, to find new channels to A, connect with fans they haven't already connected with, to have a deeper connection with fans they do have. And to get their music into arenas they might not normally consider is outlets beyond just streaming and band camp and things like that.
I think it's just important to keep your ear to the ground about what's up. There's a lot of BS out there too, and noise and stuff that's scammy, especially in the Web3 space, but some of it is going to peek through the clouds and I think we will see a bit of a new direction in the industry over the next five years or so.

Michael Walker:
Awesome. That is another topic that we could probably spend a couple hours just digging into right now, NFT stuff. We just heard back from Dapper Wallet. So we're building a music NFT integration for our software to service that uses Flow Blockchain, has a Dapper Wallet integration. I mean, that's one of the most exciting ideas for you to talk about, is the future of what do NFTs look like from a standpoint of iTunes for digital downloads, Spotify for streaming, and then what is it for music NFTs, which is we're still figuring it out.

Daniel Rowland:
We just need to take literally the name NFT and ball it up and throw it in the trash can, and people would have a lot less visceral reaction to the concept if we just named it something else. Digital collectibles, just call it that going forward and I think people would be cool. I think NFTs have gotten a little bit of a bad rap. I'm not sure where they can recover from that, at least with creatives and gamers and things like that. I thought that's super cool you're doing that. Obviously I'm a fan. But it'll be interesting to see... Music, specifically in gaming, are two spaces where adoption has less than we've seen in other areas. So I'm interested to see how it goes.

Michael Walker:
You made some awesome points about one of the ideas that you think that we're going to start seeing a trend is more user created content or blurring the lines between fans and creators so that the fans are actually able to contribute to the creative process in more meaningful ways. Maybe we can talk a little bit about that. For anyone who's listening this right now who's a musician, who maybe they've started building an audience and some of them may have hundreds of thousands or millions of fans or some of them might just have 100 fans or 200 fans.
But regardless of what amount of fans they have, what are some ways that you think that if they want to be ahead of the wave or catch the wave as it's cresting when it comes to being able to co-create things with their fans, what are some innovative ways that you think that you can give more meaningful contributions from fans to the music that you could recommend for artists?

Daniel Rowland:
I'm probably the worst person to answer that question, but I'll make the attempt. I mean, it's interesting. Not even anything new necessarily but with the rise of social media over the past 15 years or so, that's the best market research you can do ahead of releasing a proper song. You know what I mean? The fact that you can get fan feedback on things that you're doing and directions that you're thinking about going and really iterate appropriately, I think, has been hugely valuable for artists that have navigated that properly. I mean, of course, you can do things like... I mean, here's an example. Not to go on the LANDR train again, but other companies are doing this as well.
Partnering with a company is an example to do a contest around some new music you're creating or something like that. LANDR did a thing where we partnered with some significant artists and they said, "Instead of just..." It was a new way to mess with their fans. They would give us some samples or some loops and we would say, "Hey, our community, this is not uncommon. Create some music out of this. Remix this or whatever." Now it's been done a million times. But going a step farther than that and saying, "Okay, everyone come up with a song. It can be super basic. It's like Legos, put the blocks together. Or you can play guitar over it or sing over it or whatever. Then let's have our community vote on the ones that they think are the best submissions." Also, nothing groundbreaking about that.
But the idea then is that the artist would come in and pick the ones that the community curated and said, "I like these five the best." And those get released as an album. And the artist and the creator share an ownership of the streaming royalties, as do all of the fans that actually voted on the ones that the artist picked. So you're creating almost like a Web2.5 situation where you're really... I guess my point is, and again rambling about this, there's creative ways to involve the curation of fandom. I keep saying curation is creation. The fans' opinions matter because ultimately, if you're not speaking to what they like, they're not going to be fans of your music. So how do you get them involved earlier in the process?
Whether it's through social media or through the thing I just was mentioning, a contest type thing or what-have-you, or through Web3 and NFTs and that type of stuff, I mean it's really interesting to see how people are monetizing stems of their music or loops of their music with a Web3 space. I mean, there's just so many different ways you can go. Last thing here, I always bring up the example of... Maybe they were a little early on this, but what Avenge Sevenfold did in Web3 space with their Deathbats NFTs. Again, forget if NFTs aren't your thing, but it's just another way to have a fan club and engage with people where anybody who came into their fan club, which was an NFT fan club, got a special cartoon rendering of their logo that the fan had the IP rights to do whatever they want with.
You can go launch a microbrew with that logo. You could go do whatever you want to do. You could sell T-shirts and make money off that and not have to share that with the fan. You got access to special tickets and guitar lessons with the band. All these different things that you can do that gamify the fan experience. And that's easy for me to say. But ultimately, there are companies out there that are... You mentioned Dapper, of course, Revelator, Telly, Beat Club, these companies that are building on top of this idea of engaging with fandom in a new way.
It's not necessarily all cut and dry right now as we know, even when the Web3 space, it's not the easiest onboard in the world, but to me, that presents an opportunity. Once it's easy and everybody can do it, then everybody's going to do it. Now's the time to dig your heels in and learn a little bit about again, it could be Web3, it could be something else, and try to separate yourself from everybody else. So that was a big ass answer to your question, I realize. But we're in a big time.

Michael Walker:
You can keep saying that but everything that's going on your mouth is pure gold. I'm here for it.

Daniel Rowland:
I'm trying.

Michael Walker:
Cool. That's super cool. It sounds like part of this movement really revolves around ownership and having a shared identity. Which music has always been about that, right? How it expresses yourself. And when you write songs that someone loves, it's about you, but really it's about them and how they're identifying and connecting and using that song to express themselves. What better way to create that level of relationship than giving them true ownership or giving them a way to literally identify and say, "This is a part of who I am." Whether through NFTs or...

Daniel Rowland:
Sorry. Go ahead.

Michael Walker:
I was just going to say one of the practices that you just shared... I mean, I've heard of it before, but that was definitely... That's an amazing idea. Doing a remix contest where you have fans actually create music on top of your songs. They can remix things. You can choose a winner. I think that that idea alone is easily a $10,000 idea for the right artist that's earlier on as... That's a great practice. But then just in general, using that... Well, you talked about building the relationship with your fans and understanding them and getting feedback from them, there is this co-creative process that seems happens just through conversations. When we have conversations with people, we're coming together to be able to create something in that conversation. So definitely on the same page with what you're saying with building those fan relationships.

Daniel Rowland:
Definitely. Just to circle back on something, we talked about NFTs earlier and there's a lot of opinions on NFTs. Don't think about NFTs as a way to monetize fandom. People like to buy T-shirts, people like to own CDs and tapes and records and autograph signatures from members of bands because they feel more connected to that artist. Owning a piece of a song is an example, it's the same thing. Don't look at it so much, I think, as an investment or don't even try to approach it like an investment somebody's going to make $1 million on. It's just another way for somebody to feel connected with shit they love. The challenges thing...
There was an artist I was chatting with not that long ago and I love their approach where to get fans to feel invested in the music, doing polls about... They'll put up a couple different guitar solos and let fans help curate and choose which one makes the song, as an example. You know what I mean? That sounds silly, but man, if I was 15 and I got asked which Drake verse was going to be the third verse, I would love that. You know what I mean? It's another way to make me feel there's not this distance between artist and fan. And we've seen that distance shrink and shrink and shrink over the years. And you can say, "Well, that also has taken some of the mystery out of music."
But that's where we are regardless. And I think that's what people are going to continue to really do a good job of that relationship that's going to keep them having fans that are willing to pay for what they're doing and ride with them for the long term as opposed to being out and the next time they put out a single that they don't like or there's some other brighter, shinier object that comes along. You need to own that relationship.

Michael Walker:
It's so good. Super interesting conversation. I mean, it does seem like the level of investment generally is connected with how much they... I mean, ownership in general is... I mean, obviously ownership is a very vague concept that also is fundamental to our experience of life, how we view our identity and what does it mean to own something truly, what does it mean to truly own something. Is it even a real thing? It's a crazy thing. But so much of our lives are about our identities that we've created and how we express ourselves. And music, for a lot of people, is a major part of that. Bringing them into the process so they can have a voice and they can express themselves through your music. But you're doing it together. Then we're kind of expressing the shared identity that seems like it's so crucial to a lot of artists' success, is creating this shared expression of identity that comes from being a part of this community.

Daniel Rowland:
100% agree.

Michael Walker:
Sorry. This kind of stuff, I could geek out and talk about for this for hours. But hey, man, it's been great connecting and I really appreciate you taking the time to hop on here and share some of the stuff you're working on. I love conversations like this. For anyone who's listening to us right now, what would be the best next step if they've been following us along for the crazy train that we've been on, they're like, "Wow, there's so much cool stuff..."
Of course, we'll make sure to put all the links and whatnot in the bio for easy access. But could you, again, just walk through real quick the next steps? Someone's listening to us right now, they're like, "This is awesome. LANDR's super cool. I want to connect with LANDR and be a part of it." What do you recommend that they do next?

Daniel Rowland:
Jump on the website. Like I said, there's free trials of the mastering, there's free trials of all sorts of stuff that's on there. Again, I'm being vague but just do that. Go check out the website and navigate around a bit. The one thing I'll say is because what we do is so broad, the good part about that is there's going to be something that you're probably going to want or need, but there might be stuff that you don't have a use for. So that's why it makes it hard for me to say, "Go check this one thing out because there's so much." But just be aware. That's why you need to go dip a toe and play around with the site because...
Also, by the way, I'm available. If anyone has questions or wants to reach out to me, the best way to hit me up... We didn't get into this, thank God, because this would've been a four-hour podcast. I don't use social media much but I am obsessed with LinkedIn. I bet you a lot of people listening to this don't use LinkedIn, but man, I say this all the time, it's my secret sauce in the music industry. But you can find me on LinkedIn, Daniel Rowland. If you ever want to chat, hit me up, I force you to make an account, and I'll happily answer any questions or provide any direction I can.

Michael Walker:
Cool. Maybe I'll have to check out LinkedIn a little bit more seriously. I'm the same way, I tend to avoid social media, but maybe LinkedIn is the place. Cool. I mean, LANDR, for sure. One thing, like always, we'll include all the links in the show notes for easy access. Go check it out. I would highly recommend that if you're a musician right now that's listening to this, if you haven't yet, go check out LANDR. It's an amazing service. And just talk about how important it is to create a community and to raise your tree in the right environment with the fertilizer.

Daniel Rowland:
There we go. Got back to it.

Michael Walker:
That being said, one exercise, one practice I would say for everyone who goes in and does this, when you join the community, make it an exercise or a challenge for yourself to rather than asking yourself, "What can I get from this community," as soon as you join. Ask yourself, "How can I contribute to the other people in this community?" And find three other creators or three other posts or three other things that are happening right now in the community and go contribute to them and listen to their music and contribute to the community that way.
And I bet, you're going to get 10 times more value by joining their platform and contributing to that community than you would've received when you came in and we're just thinking, "What's in it for me? How can I do this?" That's just one small exercise I would recommend, is go to LANDR, join the community, check it out, make a post in there and connect with the community and contribute to at least three other creators before making an ask.

Daniel Rowland:
Man, genius. That's the secret of my success, has been going and offering value to people and not just looking for value from other people. All my biggest wins have come from exactly what you just said. So couldn't have said it better myself.

Michael Walker:
Awesome. Well, hey, man, speaking of providing value, thanks again for wrapping on today. This has been awesome. I look forward to staying in touch and hopefully geek out more about all the stuff that we talked about, Web3 and whatnot. But yeah, until next time.
Hey, it's Michael here. I hope that you got a ton of value at this episode. Make sure to check out the show notes to learn more about our guest today. And if you want to support the podcast, then there's a few ways to help us grow. First, if you hit subscribe, then I'll make sure you don't miss a new episode. Secondly, if you share it with your friends or on your social media, tag us. That really helps us out. And third, best of all, if you leave us an honest review, it's going to help us reach more musicians like you who want to take their music careers to the next level. The time to be a modern musician is now, and I look forward to seeing you on our next episode.